holocaust roleplay day

I alluded to Holocaust Roleplay Day several times in other articles. I’ve gotten a couple messages about it. In other venues, when I mention it, I’m met with sheer disbelief. Plenty of people just can’t imagine a school doing something like this. Please believe me when I say that my small, rural public school had this event!

We followed something called the “Living History” curriculum in our world history class. It was a huge deal for us in middle school, featuring a wide array of fun hands-on projects that were way more entertaining than the textbook. It was usually great. It included things like our yearly Wax Museum. But it also included Holocaust Roleplay Day.

That was exactly what it sounds like, too. So, fair warning.

During Holocaust Roleplay Day, each of us walked in, and were handed a leaflet describing a prisoner of the Nazis during World War II. I can’t remember for sure, but I think it was implied that these were real people and we were reading actual histories. In retrospect, I find that tasteless and disturbing, but it probably seemed like a good way to “engage” everyone in history at the time.

We were told to adopt the persona of the person in question during the exercises. The leaflet listed things like their age, ethnicity, career, health,, and of course, their history. Some students traded leaflets for various reasons, and it was, as you might expect, extremely unsettling. I remember getting the file of a woman in her fifties who died, but not much else beyond that.

Certain students, chosen specifically by the teacher, were not given a prisoner’s folder. They were instead given information about guards within the camp - Nazis. They were assigned to read about, and, in theory, roleplay as the Nazis? They didn’t do much roleplaying, but were given different material to study than the rest of us. I’m to this day unsure how the teacher chose which students would participate in this way. I suspect he just chose kids who he thought would be calm about it.

The classroom was divided into sections representing various areas of the Nazi genocide. We (our characters) moved through them, ultimately reaching the side of the classroom by the window. There, we were said to have died in the gas chambers. Other students lingered in other areas, and the teachers told us about horrific things like typhus and medical experiments, as you might expect. We would sit in the designated area and read material (quietly and respectfully - in theory) about that part of the genocide. Then, eventually, we’d all move on to the next, until the exercise was over.

We were eighth graders, but we did try to take this seriously. There were probably some kids who were burgeoning bigots, but they kept their mouths shut. We wandered through the classroom trying to figure out how we should react to all this. I maintained my composure, a few other kids couldn’t stop from tearing up or just acting really disturbed by the entire thing. It wasn’t the most practical assignment we’d been given, clearly.

I was usually bullied pretty regularly in high school and (especially) middle school. Strangely, nobody felt the inclination to try that during Holocaust Roleplay Day, or treat me any differently at all. Everyone’s emotional energy was spend on handing the exercise itself, and nobody saw any point in bullying me (or anyone else) during, I suppose. I heard a rumor that the “guards” were chosen specifically because they were students not known to be bullies, but who knows?

Either way, Holocaust Roleplay Day happened every year as far as I remember. I recall being in seventh grade, sixth grade, etc, and hearing about the other classes doing this. The entire middle school knew about it, and was waiting for it in eight grade. People discussed it at lunch - “Hey! Did you stop yourself from crying doing Holocaust Roleplay Day?” Or “Who did they pick for the guards doing yours?” etc. It felt like a rite of passage for some reason.

I guess I should mention that this was hardly the only roleplay exercise as part of the “Living History” curriculum. There were plenty of others. We also roleplayed as whole citystates to learn about the way trade worked in ancient times, for example. I got to experience the Peloponnesian War. Holocaust Roleplay Day was, of course, the most notoriously anticipated lesson, though.

Nobody seemed to think this exercise was in poor taste. Nowadays, I plainly see that it was. I hope no other classes ever have to deal with this nonsense. That said, in the 1990s, this probably seemed progressive to whoever wrote the “Living History” curriculum. It had some of us acting awfully strange - we had to be learning something meaningful, right? .

(There were no Jewish children in any class participating, none at my school at all. I wonder what this exercise would’ve been like at a school with a more diverse student body, but I’ve no clue how it was done elsewhere, if at all.)